May 18, 2017 Published ~ 2 years ago.

You want to go to Tokyo, so you hit up Google Flights and do some research. Tickets are around $800, but you close your browser window and decide to look again later. A couple of months pass, and those same flights are now $1,200. What gives? It’s called price discrimination, and colleges use the same strategy to sell…

May 16, 2017 Published ~ 2 years ago.

A note from the editors: As a community, we can learn so much from discovering what other developers are doing around the world. We encourage everyone to participate in this very brief survey created by Jens Oliver Meiert. Jens will share the results—and an updated guide to web maintainability based on the findings—in a few weeks.

How often do we consider the maintenance and general maintainability of our websites and apps? What steps do we actively take to make and keep them maintainable? What stands in the way when we maintain our and other people’s projects?

Many of us, as web developers, know very well how to code something. But whether we know just as well how to maintain what we—and others—have written, that is not so clear. Our bosses and clients may not always think about maintenance down the road, either.

May 12, 2017 Published ~ 2 years ago.

We’ve got some exciting news to share. Web and interaction design studio.zeldman is moving, from our digs at 148 Madison Avenue to a new location on Fifth Avenue. As of June 1, we’ll be designing, creating, and consulting out of our beautiful new studio space at The Yard: Flatiron North.

But we’re tired of playing landlord. Instead of debugging the internet router, tending to the recycling, hiring HVAC repair people, and seeking suitable replacement studio mates when a company moves out, we’d rather spend our time solving our clients’ design problems and making cool stuff like A List Apart, A Book Apart, The Big Web Show, and An Event Apart. And The Yard’s the perfect place for us to ply our trade and make our goods. (Plus we still get to rub shoulders with other creative business folk.)

We can’t take it with us: furnish your office with our stuff!

Running a co-working studio space meant buying a lot of furniture and equipment. Beautiful stuff, still in great condition. Elegant stuff, because we’re designers. Stuff we won’t need any more, now that we’re moving to new digs where somebody else does landlord duty. So we’re selling it, for a lot less than we paid. And that’s where (maybe) you come in.

May 8, 2017 Published ~ 2 years ago.

It has been estimated that prior to the European invention of typographic printing in the mid-fifteenth century, some ten million manuscripts were produced.* During the incunabula (c. 1450–1500), some 30,000 editions were printed in as many as thirteen million copies. Thus, in the course of just fifty years, more books were produced than had been in the previous 1,000 years! But what did fifteenth century readers read? For the most part, Renaissance readers differed little from their medieval forebears. One third of everything published in the fifteenth century was religious in nature, and as this is Europe prior to the Reformation, then by religious literature we mean that of the Catholic Church. The greatest proportion comprised liturgical books, like missals and psalters. Then the many smaller format books for private devotional use, like Books of Hours and prayer books. Then Bibles (Latin and vernacular) and Bible commentaries and books on canon or Church law, various edicts and Papal Bulls and broadsides (a single large sheet printed on one side).

Although the Renaissance remained profoundly religious, it was obsessed with pagan antiquity in all its aspects. In the literature of classical antiquity, the humanist scholars of the Renaissance, from Petrarch, saw in it a perfect or ideal model for Latin, which had, in their opinion, been adulterated during the long Middle Ages. Classical manuscripts came to be viewed as the gold standard of Latin style and orthography and great efforts were taken to track down lost manuscripts. Thus the fifttenth century witnessed a resurgence in the works of classical Roman and Greek philosophers and poets, from Cicero, published in more than 300 editions during the fifteenth century, to Aristotle, Virgil and Seneca, to name but a few.

Of the approximately 30,000 known editions published during the incunabula, close to 2,100 editions (≈15%) were of the classical authors. Of these, my favorite is the great didactic poem, On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura) by Titus Lucretius Carus (c. 99 – 55 BC). The work had been all but forgotten during the thousand-year Middle Ages, until rediscovered in a South German monastery in January of 1417 by book hunter and scholar, Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459). In addition to being a model for its exemplary Latin style, its ideas would sow the seeds for later intellectual and scientific movements. On the Nature of Things is a book of natural philosophy or science in which the author, espouses and defends the philosophy of Epicurianism, tackling everything from the infinite nature and constitution of the universe, that everything is made of atoms existing in a void, that the soul is mortal, that death is not to be feared, how civilizations and religions begin, through to the more prosaic; for example, the preferred position for successful conception, “breast down and loins up.” (Book 4:1263–77)

On the Nature of Things was first published in print in In about 1473–74 by Thomas Ferrandus, a teacher, probably in Brescia, in Lombardy, northern Italy. He likely learned to print in Milan or Venice (I believe the timing makes Venice the more likely). Little else is known about Ferrandus besides the books he printed and that in 1475 he quit printing to become a priest. However, he did resume printing in 1493. He died in poverty in the first decade of the sixteenth century.

I have not seen the first edition printed by Ferrandus and there are no digital scans or photos available. Only four editions* of the work appear in the fifteenth century – all published in northern Italy (Brescia, Verona and Venice). The image above reproduces a page from an edition printed in Verona in September 1486 by Paulus Fridenperger. The last of the fifteenth century was published by Aldus Manutius in 1500.

Aldus Manutius’ edition of On the nature of Things, published in Venice in December 1500. The woodcut initials first appear in his famed Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of 1499. Image courtesy of Bayerische Staatsbibliothek

It would be another 200 years before Lucretius’ ideas gained traction against religious dogma. It wasn’t translated into the vernacular until the seventeenth century: First in French in 1650, and in English, in the same decade, by Lucy Hutchinson. Thanks to those translators and to early pionerring printers, like Ferrandus, Lucretius’ great work was guaranteed survival, that it might educate, inspire and console countless generations. And Lucretius’ words are a constant reminder that truth and the search for truth matters.

If you’re interested in learning more about Lucretius’ wonderful On the Nature of Things, then I recommend the informative, entertaining and Pulitzer Prize-winning, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt.

May 8, 2017 Published ~ 2 years ago.

UnderConsideration, the force behind some of the best and longest running digital publications on design, organizers of amazing conferences, and fellow Austin residents have pulled stakes to move to Bloomington, Indiana. That’s right, some incredibly creative, entrepreneurial, smart people just left one of the hottest cities in North America for a small town in Indiana, the type that was recently the subject of parody on television.

One of the keys to doing what we do, which is an unconventional and highly unlikely way of earning an incomean income that is sufficient for a few extravagances like an HBO subscription (I know, living large!)for two adults, two kids, and two dogs, is to have a low cost of living. The cost of living in Austin has increased, our property taxes are off the roof, and the traffic has become pretty insane. Even the Austin airport, which was super chill is now nearing JFK levels at peak hours.

As an Austin resident of six years I find myself nodding in agreement, especially at the last bit about the airport. Austin Bergstrom was one of the most chill airports in the country and now it’s just as stressful as Oakland on a Monday morningevery day. I knew Austin was going to blow up, but I had no idea it would scale so big, so quickly. And it’s still growing like crazy. The city and surrounding area is set to double in size in the next twenty years.

I don’t know that Kitchen Storey and I could move to the middle-middle of the country, but we’re certainly starting to consider that it’s time to move back to the Pacific Time Zone. Airport lines be dammed.

March 7, 2017 Published ~ 3 years ago.

I’ve been working in the software industry for over 25 years. Pretty much my entire professional career (if you don’t count that stint as a night clerk at Red Roof Inn).

Back in the late 1900s, when you sold software, you sold software. What your company produced was a large set of properly aligned bits (software). You then got those bits to your customers somehow (floppy disk, DVD, FTP, whatever). And, then those customers installed those bits on a computer of their choosing and if all went well, they’d get some value out of it. But, that wouldn’t always happen. Often, they’d fail to ever install it and get it working. Or fail to learn it. Or fail to use it properly. Basically fail to get the value expected — or the value promised, or sometimes any value. Ironically, the higher the purchase price was, the lower the chances of seeing success. History is replete with multi-million dollar software purchases that never saw the light of day. As an entrepreneur, this pains me. Most start software companies to make money, they start companies to solve problems.

Now, fast-forward to today. It’s 2017. Many software companies are now Software as a Service (SaaS) companies. What they produce is the same as before: A large set of properly aligned bits (software). Only now, instead of shipping those bits off to the customer somehow, they “host” those bits on the customers behalf and off the benefit of that software as a service.

Makes sense, right?

Now, naive folks that are new to SaaS often make the mistake of thinking they’re still selling software. They’re not. Because…

SaaS = Success as a Service

If you’re in the SaaS business, the only way to survive in the long-term is not to just deliver software. It’s to deliver success. You have to actually deliver the benefit that the software is promised to provide. And, if the customer fails to get that benefit then you have failed. Do not pass GO, do not collect $200.

The reason for this new bar is relatively straight-forward. Back in the old days, you got paid for your software upfront and though you wanted your customer to succeed, and maybe even labored to help them succeed, if they didn’t succeed, well, such was life and you moved on. Today, if the customer doesn’t succeed, they cancel. In a month, in a quarter, in a year — but eventually, they cancel. And, more likely than not, if they cancel, you’ve lost money. The math won’t work.

So, to survive and thrive in the long-term, you can’t sell software, or even access to software, you have to sell — and deliver — success.

Let me give you a concrete example and some lessons learned from my company, HubSpot, which provides marketing/sales software. HubSpot is a textbook SaaS company. We’re about 10 years old, and we’re now public [NYSE:HUBS].

Here’s what we invest in (because it works):

1. Onboarding. If you help customers get started with your product, they are more likely to do so. Ideally, your software is so simple and intuitive and easy that customers just get up and running and succeed on their own. But, if you have a relatively broad or sophisticated product, customers will often need help. In those cases, onboarding works.

2. Education. HubSpot has HubSpot Academy, which is a team that helps educate people on inbound marketing. Interestingly, they don’t just invest in HubSpot customers, they educate the broader marketing industry.

3. Community. HubSpot hosts inbound.org, an online community built for marketers. It allows them to find the best content (curated by the community itself), discuss topics of interest, post jobs and find jobs. It acts as the premier professional network for marketers. The community has over 200,000 members now.

February 28, 2017 Published ~ 3 years ago.

We run a number of WordPress Multisite installations on our dedicated server for a variety of clients. Our largest installation, for Share the Practice, currently consists of 88 individual WordPress sites. A number of these sites use sub-domains, but for most of them we map custom domain URLs onto the main WordPress Multisite installation.

WHM / cPanel now offers easy SSL installation, but there is a small catch: it only allows 200 domains per virtual host, and the documentation about this is a little confusing. We had been using the “Park” or “Alias” function in cPanel to handle the mapping for each domain, but then ran over the limit, as WHM creates multiple subdomains for each domain you add that way.

The workaround for this was to use “Addon Domain” instead of “Alias”. This creates a separate virtual host for each domain, and will therefore enable an individual SSL certificate for each, getting around the 200 domain limit.

To make this work, we followed these steps:

Sign into cPanel account

Open up Aliases

Check that a given domain does NOT have email accounts or email forwarders set.

If NO email forwarders or accounts have been set up, first copy the domain name, then click the “Remove” link for the domain on the Aliases page.

Create a new Addon Domain (paste the domain name into the field). For a WordPress Multisite installation, set the Document Root to be public_html (or wherever your installation lives in the parent account).

Repeat for each domain you want to switch over, until you get back below the 200 domain limit.

AutoSSL will attempt to regenerate your SSL certs each time you add a new Addon Domain.

Review the AutoSSL logs in WHM to check for any errors in the SSL certificate creation process